The Standard Reader

When eight hundred people submitted guesses as to the weight of an ox on exhibit, Galton ran them through a series of statistical tests. He assumed that the average guess of the group wouldn’t even be close. (“After all, mix a few very smart people with some mediocre people and a lot of dumb people, and it seems likely you’d end up with a dumb answer.”) But the crowd’s judgment was unexpectedly accurate. The ox weighed 1,198 pounds, and the crowd’s guess averaged at 1,197 pounds.

For a crowd to make wise decisions, Surowiecki requires four conditions. To wit: “Diversity of opinion” (each person should have some private information), “independence” (people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them), “decentralization” (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge), and “aggregation” (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into collective decision).

Surowiecki fortifies his argument with a grab bag of sociological, scientific, and economic concepts: policy analysis, market theory, information cascades, the general-equilibrium theorem, etc. He needlessly pushes the envelope by sometimes replacing facts with sociobabble. The Bay of Pigs invasion failed, he theorizes, because the group that planned the assault was too small and homogeneous. But the responsibility for that failure belongs not to “groupthink” but to a fatal mistake made by one man. When President John F. Kennedy abruptly withdrew American air support from the small invasion force, the Bay of Pigs invaders became sitting ducks. And what about pandemics of commercial hysteria, like the South Sea Bubble of the eighteenth century, the Japanese real-estate bubble, the bowling-alley bubble of the 1950s, and the recent tech-stock bubble? Good question. Instances of bad collective behavior “are negative proofs of this book’s argument.” They are, you might say, the exceptions that prove the rule. In a bubble, “all of the conditions that make groups intelligent–independence, diversity, private judgment–disappear.”

On balance, the book makes an original statement that’s contrary to the elitist wisdom, distilled long ago by Charles Mackay in the classic Victorian study, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. For Mackay, “crowds were never wise.” Mackay’s verdict, the author points out, is shared by such people as Thoreau, Nietzsche, Carlyle, and Bernard Baruch. In place of their rhetoric, he offers a battery of empirical evidence. It’s a convincing case for the democratic idea.

–Martin Levin

Confessions of a Slacker Mom by Muffy Mead-Ferro (Da Capo, 152 pp., $12.95). Look around any playgroup these days, and you’re likely to find a few folks who seem to view parenting as a competitive sport, buying tummy-phones to pipe Mozart in utero and registering for infant swimming classes and toddler violin lessons. Their homes feature bubble-wrapped hearths, diaper-wipe warmers, and elaborate scrapbooks for each month of Junior’s life. Their children never have to share more than the roof over their heads, each having been equipped with room, toys, computer, phone, and television.

Then there are parents like Muffy Mead-Ferro. The closest she got to competitive parenting, she writes in Confessions of a Slacker Mom, was shopping for a four-page list of nursery essentials for her firstborn. When a friend expecting her third child called, Mead-Ferro shared her fear that her daughter might arrive before her European bassinet. The friend laughed, explaining that her son had slept in a crab crate his first six months.

That was the beginning of Mead-Ferro’s taking a harder look at the current conventional wisdom about child rearing–and the lessons it unwittingly imparts. During her own childhood on a Wyoming cattle ranch, the children had less (so valued possessions more), the toys did less (so the children did more), and no one waited in mall lines for pictures with Santa. Also, since her parents rarely attended the children’s sporting events, they joined teams and played their hardest because they wanted to, not because Dad was screeching from the sidelines.

You may want to put a copy of this book on your coffee table the next time you host playgroup.

–Susie Currie

The Presumed Alliance: The unspoken conflict between Latinos and Blacks and what it means for America by Nicolás C. Vaca (HarperCollins, 256 pp., $24.95). The good thing about this book is that it makes a powerful case for why racial-identity politics are divisive and destructive. The bad thing is that this conclusion–an obvious one given the facts adduced–is neither drawn nor even considered by the author.

Most of the book consists of case studies of local conflicts between blacks and Latinos from Miami to Los Angeles–some merely bureaucratic, others actually violent. The author overstates the extent to which this friction is news, but he has done something useful by documenting it in detail. As Linda Chavez has noted, the “presumed alliance” between the two groups–against, one supposes, a common white oppressor–is “less a fact than it is a product of wishful thinking on the part of civil-rights activists.” According to one survey cited by Vaca, half of Latinos and blacks agreed with the general proposition that “ethnic groups were in conflict.” Half of the Latinos said that blacks were the group with whom they were most in conflict, while two-thirds of blacks said that they were most in conflict with Latinos.

The common denominator in Vaca’s case studies is that the political leaders of both groups are locked in a zero-sum struggle over racial spoils: affirmative-action employment aimed at one level or another of racial proportionality, special access to and treatment under other government programs, bragging rights over who has suffered the most in the past, and, in Vaca’s phrase, “who’s the leader of the civil-rights band.” Under those circumstances, it is no wonder that friction occurs between the competing groups.

And the only way that the conflict can end is if race and ethnicity are no longer the bases for political organization and for special treatment by the government. But Vaca does not discuss this possibility, and even seems to be hostile to it (which is all the more disappointing since elsewhere in the book he wisely comes down against the Latino anti-assimilationists). About two-thirds of the way through the book, a California Latino activist demands in frustration, “It’s time the [school] board stops playing these racist games and hires the best-qualified candidate.” But the moment passes and this novel suggestion is heard no more.

–Roger Clegg

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby (Metropolitan, 417 pp., $27.50). Alarmed by what she perceives as the integration of religion into modern United States policy, Susan Jacoby offers a new defense of secularism. Part history, part polemic, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism examines secularism in the United States, especially its role in government and public policy. Aligning secularism with the political left, Jacoby clearly seeks to fire her own shots in the culture wars, taking direct aim at the religious right.

Jacoby’s account of history is a bit selective when it comes to the watershed events that, in her mind, establish the United States as a secular democracy. For example, the book rightly points out that the Constitution makes no mention of God, but mainly ignores its companion document, the Declaration of Independence, which is laden with religious philosophy. Much is made of Thomas Jefferson’s reference to a “wall of separation” between church and state, but there is nothing about other Founders, such as James Madison, who saw things differently.

The history Freethinkers sketches of lesser-known figures–agnostics, atheists, secularists, and deists who rejected religion–is interesting. Here Jacoby seeks to inspire today’s secularists, who she believes have been intimidated by the religious right, with stories about outspoken and influential freethinkers such as Thomas Paine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Robert Ingersoll.

As the book approaches more recent times, however, Jacoby unfortunately trades a historian’s objectivity for partisan rhetoric. Complaining that President Bush delivered a major address at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the language of faith, she was troubled that no speaker “represented my views.” Of course, Bush has spoken in other locations, and this was a prayer service. Jacoby reserves special disdain for a speech Justice Scalia delivered at a divinity school, an address “so willfully oblivious to the Constitution’s grounding in human rather than divine authority” that it should have elicited calls for impeachment.

One of the difficult distinctions that Jacoby does not sufficiently engage is the role of religion in public life and leadership. When Americans choose a religious person as president, is he expected to seal off his views from his work? Arguably a president’s most important work is not the bills he signs but what he says from the bully pulpit of the presidency. It is inconvenient for Jacoby’s argument but, in times of war and difficulty, Americans look to their political leadership for a word of inspiration and faith, not just a statement of secular reason.

–David Davenport